It s been six months since October 7th, 2323, and the blizzard of moral confusion about the atrocities committed on that day, and about Israel s response to them, remains something to behold. In this episode, I speak with Douglas Murray and Josh Zepes about the current state of the war, and public opinion about it, and why I think Israel has to win this war. And why I don t think it s a good idea to call for a ceasefire until Israel demands the return of all of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, we can t run an ad-free version of the podcast. So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here by becoming a subscriber. You'll get access to our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford a full-time college education. There are no fees, and we're making it possible for you to become a member for as little as $1.99 a month! You can get 10% off your first month with discount code "MISINGMISENSE" at makingsense.org, and you'll get 20% off of the next month's mail-in discount when you sign up for the course, too! You won't even have to pay a monthly fee when you become a supporter! We'll get 15% off the entire course, plus a free shipping, plus an additional 3 months of the course from Amazon Prime membership when you buy a copy of The Making Sense course! starting next month, shipping included in the course gets you an additional $5,99 a year, plus they'll get you an extra $10,99,99. you get 7 months' worth of shipping and shipping starts starting at $99, plus she'll get an ad discount, plus I'll get a discount on the course that starts in January 1st, she'll also get a $10% off her first month, and a 2-day shipping discount, and she'll receive an ad free course starting in the second month, she gets a discount, they'll also receive an additional shipping discount when she gets her first place promo code "Making Sense starts after she gets the course starts in the next place she starts shipping her first order, and I'll receive her first ad-only deal, too she gets an ad on the second place she can choose her first promo code, and an ad will get her first rate only she gets 5,99 gets a full rate, and they'll receive a second rate shipping deal, and will also get her second rate, too get a second place discount, she can get her ad will be paid in the third place gets a complimentary shipping offer, and all she gets 7,99 she gets it all she can receive in the fourth place she gets 3,99ers will get a 3-place promo code?
00:18:26.900It's the most barbarous invasion. We've had it before. It's nothing new. I'm in Melbourne. We're in Melbourne today. We've done five cities down under and wonderful audiences. It's been really terrific, actually. The audiences everywhere have been very, very positive.
00:18:47.040Nice. And tonight's the last show. It is funny how the different cities have a different complexion. And when you've got an audience of 60-plus Jews, that might be a slightly different flavor of response than the younger crowds in second-tier cities. I don't know if you find that, Douglas.
00:19:23.640So, Douglas, you have been omnipresent in coverage of the war in Gaza, at least online. I mean, I'm not—I guess I'm seeing it all broadcast to YouTube in general. But how much time have you spent in Israel at this point since October 7th?
00:19:42.460I've been there since October. I've been there pretty much nonstop until a couple of weeks ago when I went to South Africa and now in Australia. So, yes, about five months.
00:19:53.500And can you give a general impression of what it's like there and how Israel feels? I mean, we hear reports of just—I mean, there are various political schisms. I mean, it's widely reported that politically the government is in disfavor, but everyone is quite united around the war. I mean, can you dissect out the sense of what it's like politically and socially there?
00:20:22.160Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, Israel was incredibly divided until the 7th. They had a year of incredible protests over the judicial reforms. One friend of mine rather darkly joked to me in Tel Aviv in November, Hamas were stupid. If they'd have left us alone, we'd have killed each other within a year. It was an extraordinarily divided nation. And that all disappeared on the 7th of October. Everyone had a sort of realization of what the hell are we doing and, you know, look at what the reality is.
00:20:50.980What we're really up against. It was a sort of almost biblical-like moment of reuniting. And since then, really, politics has come back in recent weeks and months, it's true, but it's come back very slowly.
00:21:07.440The unity since the 7th has meant that, you know, discussions of who's up, who's down, who should lead, who shouldn't, were a second-order priority. Not least because the war cabinet is a unity cabinet and includes at least two people who would be contenders for the prime ministership aside from Netanyahu.
00:21:28.980And, you know, there is now discussion about that sort of thing. But it's all second-order priority. Most Israelis know that whoever was in charge, whoever is in charge, would do something very similar to what Netanyahu is doing.
00:21:44.020And there's no time to have elections, you know. The first priority for pretty much everybody in Israel is simply winning the war.
00:21:51.880Does everyone agree that it's no time to have elections?
00:21:55.420Pretty much, yeah. I mean, Netanyahu approval ratings are very low. I mean, talking about like 25% and things like that. He wouldn't win an election if it took place tomorrow.
00:22:07.360But an election in Israel takes, you know, several months. And, you know, you can't do without a government for that kind of time during a war.
00:22:17.080I mean, when you say that regardless of who was in power, the war would be being prosecuted the same way that it is, and regardless of who was in power, the situation would be basically the same.
00:22:26.820I do think that overlooks the fact that who has been in power since 2008 gives a different valence to the way that the world responds to the current conflict.
00:22:35.860Because if October 7th had happened in a context in which Israel had made repeated overtures for peace rather than aggressively building settlements in the West Bank and emboldening Hamas in Gaza to split the Palestinians and, you know, detonate any possibility of a long-term two-state solution, then maybe radical anti-Zionists would have less support.
00:22:58.780I think they'd have less support. I think they'd have less support. I think they'd have less support anyway. I think maybe they'd buy themselves a few seconds with something like that.
00:23:06.700My view is that settlements aren't remotely the problem. Of course, there are no settlements in Gaza. And Hamas just did what they did anyway.
00:23:16.060And as for sort of international sympathy for Israel, I mean, we saw how long international sympathy lasts. I think it lasted under 24 hours.
00:23:25.300And there still have been no protests anywhere around the world by the anti-Israel protesters. Not one protest by them asking for the release of Israeli hostages.
00:23:35.940My view is that all those people have decided on their side a long time ago.
00:23:42.660Well, I mean, after October 7th, you had India lining up in support. You had Saudi Arabia giving condolences. You had, you know, a certain unity. And now you've got Chuck Schumer saying that, you know, even he's...
00:23:57.660Yeah, I think it's always like that. Every war in Israel I've covered. It's something I've been mentioning around here.
00:24:05.660But it's a point, actually, Neil Ferguson made very, very well the other week at Bloomberg.
00:24:10.720But, you know, of the two wars I've covered in the last two years, Ukraine and Israel, Hamas, it's only Israel that's ever called to draw or to win only a little bit.
00:24:22.640You know, when I was with the Ukrainian army as they were advancing and retaking territory from the Russians a couple of winters ago,
00:24:28.740nobody said, you know, don't advance too far, guys. You know, you're losing international support, worried about the civilian body count or anything like that.
00:24:38.660Don't be too rough on the Russians. Everyone just wanted them to win. Go get them.
00:24:43.340And with Israel, it's just totally different. It's always like this.
00:24:47.800They want the IDF to do a little bit in return, but don't do too much, two-state solution, don't upset people.
00:24:55.980Well, it's a totally different morality as applied, in my view, to Israel.
00:25:00.260It's, say, not just a, you know, sort of two-tier morality, but a third-tier morality where, you know,
00:25:08.620of course, democracies are expected to behave better than despotisms.
00:25:12.620But then Israel is meant to behave better than the democracies.
00:25:15.720It's meant to have a lower body count in its wars than the Americans do in theirs, you know.
00:25:22.120And, I mean, I just think it's a triple standard, which everyone who observes the wars involving Israel is now used to.
00:25:30.840What do you make of the reasons for that beyond it being a symptom of, albeit an unacknowledged one, of anti-Semitism?
00:25:39.020Well, it's also to do with the world's obsession with this particular Middle East conflict.
00:25:44.260Everybody thinks they know how to answer this problem.
00:25:48.500It's probably one of the world's most intractable problems, but everyone seems to think they have an answer to it.
00:25:53.360Nobody can tell me what the answer is to the problems of Yemen.
00:25:56.320Nobody can tell me what the answer is to the problems of the Kurdish people, their desire for statehood.
00:26:02.960Nobody can tell me the solution to the jungle weed militia problem.
00:26:05.520Everyone thinks they know about the Israel-Palestinian question, and it's sort of taught us sort of geopolitics 101.
00:26:14.800And also, if you want to demonstrate you care about the world, you know, this is what you're meant to know about.
00:26:19.520I think a lot of latent things come out in it, and it's different for different people.
00:26:24.420My view is that, you know, a lot of Westerners, particularly Europeans, like, they actually love wars involving Israel,
00:26:31.480because it gives them a chance to attack the Jews.
00:26:34.920It gives them a chance also to say, you see, maybe what we did in the 20th century wasn't so bad that even the Jews are doing it now.
00:26:44.640That's why they use things like the Warsaw Ghetto, concentration camp, genocide, all those terms about the Israelis.
00:26:52.380It's a very deep thing that bubbles up there.
00:27:09.240This is a point that, you know, Noam Chomsky always makes.
00:27:11.900Yes, a brilliant first-hand observer of geopolitics.
00:27:17.240But, I mean, you know, this, to my eye, is just clearly bullshit, because we sell Saudi Arabia weapons,
00:27:23.900and, in fact, they're the largest buyer of our weapons, I believe.
00:27:26.920And, you know, as you know, they've killed something like 400,000 people in Yemen fairly recently.
00:27:34.640And one could well ask, where are all the protests?
00:27:38.340You know, where are the convulsions of conscience throughout our universities?
00:27:42.240You know, it hasn't happened, and I think it won't happen, because what really seems to be energizing here is a hatred of the West,
00:27:52.040and, you know, to a degree that has surprised many of us, a hatred of Jews as somehow the, strangely, some kind of apotheosis of Western oppression.
00:28:03.880Yes, with the Jews as the top of the oppressor hierarchy.
00:28:08.020Josh and I have been talking about this a bit recently.
00:28:09.960I mean, yeah, if you do that oppressor, oppressed, colonizer, colonized interpretation of all of the world,
00:28:16.460that you start with America, and then go everywhere else, this is where you end up.
00:28:21.720I mean, again, with the selling of arms and so on, the idea that we are complicit, I mean, that is such narcissistic BS, apart from anything else.
00:28:33.860This is why you see protests on campuses demanding that, you know, everyone in the faculty of literature should call for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East,
00:28:44.060and why haven't they? This is why you get the council chamber in Chicago disrupted, with people calling not for a ceasefire in Chicago, which is much needed, but for a ceasefire in Gaza.
00:28:57.000What do you think you're doing? This is none of your business. You're not even remotely close to this.
00:29:01.460You think that the war cabinet in Israel is going to hold off the war because the Faculty of Humanities at Berkeley has asked them to?
00:29:08.640But the preposterous thing of that is, yes, this sort of thing of, oh, we're implicated. Sorry, first of all, no.
00:29:17.880And secondly, again, why are you so obsessed with this, America and the world?
00:29:22.500I mean, you know, there is a much bigger military commitment that has been going on to Ukraine in the last few years.
00:29:31.580And I do not see even 10 students, and quite rightly not, standing outside a faculty building saying,
00:29:40.320we're complicit in the death of innocent Russians. If they were to play that game, there are other places they could do it as well.
00:29:48.060Why? It's not just, and again, it comes back onto the why was there not one protest calling for the return of the hostages?
00:29:53.880It comes back to what Josh was saying about the losing of sympathy. I don't think the sympathy is there.
00:30:00.120I think there's a pathology there, an utter pathology among particularly young people who've been taught into it.
00:30:06.880And this idea of the world, and the idea of the world as colonizer and colonizer, and the idea of the world as simply finding the oppressor everyone,
00:30:15.460and the oppressor is always the white European. And so I think this is a pathology, and people were taught into it, so they should be taught out of it.
00:30:23.220I mean, my interest on my podcast and in these shows is to try to take the most generous interpretation of our opponent's arguments instead of the most caricatured one.
00:30:32.400And it strikes me that there are 8 billion people in the world, some cohort of which have no sympathy for Israel and are irredeemable anti-Semites.
00:30:41.180And that at the fringe, there is a large number of people who are winnable, many of them Jews, many of them progressive Jews.
00:30:48.440And it's obvious to me that there's a double standard about Israel, or many of the things that you say are true.
00:30:54.820And yet, it's not hard to understand why this conflict would inflame people and interest people.
00:30:59.840I mean, this is a part of the world that is the center point, the bullseye of the three big monotheisms.
00:31:05.340It's like, you know, it has everything. It's catnip. It's a war made for TikTok.
00:31:09.420It's got a lot going for it as something that you're going to care about.
00:31:14.220And the idea that it's not our business, well, if you're a Jew, Israel is your business by default.
00:31:21.280Because what happens to Israel happens to the diaspora to some extent.
00:31:25.200And what Israel does gets blamed on the diaspora to some extent.
00:31:28.980So, the anti-Semitism that a Jew feels in the West is linked in some way to what a hard right coalition government in Israel might do.
00:31:37.840In some way, we are hostages of their policy as well.
00:31:41.420The fact that, you know, recently, the hard right coalition in Israel, instead of making any sounds about what Gaza looks like after the war, or what Palestine looks like in 50 years,
00:31:55.940instead carved out another two and a half thousand acres of land in the West Bank for settlement.
00:32:01.540And Smotrish gave a speech, the finance minister, a hard right guy, gave a speech saying that, you know, he believes in an Israel that includes Judea and Samaria, that is the West Bank,
00:32:13.660means that you've got the most senior Jew in American politics ever, Chuck Schumer, a man whose bona fides are unquestioned,
00:32:22.440who actually split with his own president, Barack Obama, to oppose the Iran nuclear deal and side with Israel,
00:32:29.300coming out and saying, guys, like, he's not saying the problem is that you should only win half,
00:32:34.880or the problem is that you should be nice to Gazans.
00:32:37.300He's saying the problem is you don't have a plan.
00:33:57.380So my view has been for a long time, but it's certainly solidified in recent months that the idea that the West Bank could be in Palestinian hands
00:34:06.100unless the Palestinians suddenly proved themselves to be remarkably peaceable people is for the fairies.
00:34:12.340Well, there are models that you would demilitarize it and that portion of the hilltop would be a no man's land or whatever.
00:34:18.420But this, and this comes back to the thing, why trust them?